1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a method and apparatus for unified alerting of subscribers.
2. Description of Related Art
In this age of telecommunication explosion, a person may subscribe to a large number of different services such as paging service, cellphone service, e-mail service and many others delivered over the telephone network or the Internet, for example. A subscriber to multiple services may receive messages in any one of the services during a period of time even when that particular service is not accessible to the subscriber. Thus, the subscriber may be unaware of messages and miss opportunities to take timely action. Accordingly, new technology is needed to improve techniques for alerting subscribers.
This invention provides for a unified alerting system that alerts the subscriber via one or more subscriber identified devices. The unified alerting system includes a unified alerting device that receives alert events from services subscribed to by the subscriber such as e-mail, paging service, wireless mobile service (e.g., cellphone), Internet services, etc. The unified alerting device filters the alert event and, based on the filtering results, may generate an alert to one or more devices identified in a subscriber profile.
The alert event is filtered by a set of logic specified by the subscriber in terms of if-then-else statements containing conditions and actions, for example. Conditions have Boolean values of TRUE and FALSE based on values of variables as specified by the subscriber. For example, one variable may be the time of day while other variables may have Boolean values that are defined by the subscriber. For example, a Boolean variable A is TRUE if a title of an e-mail includes xe2x80x9cproject Xxe2x80x9d; otherwise, the Boolean variable A has a value of FALSE.
The actions included in the subscriber logic may set various control variables such as urgency level or priority or may be further if-then-else statements. In this way, the subscriber may specify complex conditions that process each alert event to determine whether the subscriber should be alerted via one of the available devices.
The subscriber profile includes entries corresponding to each of possible devices through which the subscriber may be alerted. A schedule may be entered by the subscriber that indicates times when each of the devices may be used to alert the subscriber. The profile also may include a priority level corresponding to each of the devices during time periods when multiple devices are available. Thus, the subscriber may specify during any time period which of the available devices is/are preferred for the alerting function.
The unified alerting device may also perform various conversions such as voice-to-text and text-to-voice or information extracted for their summaries so that messages received via text may be converted to voice and voice communication may be converted to text and the subscriber may converse with another party regardless of the capabilities of the device used.